Unreality TV: 'The Donald' Meets 'the Blacks'
Awk-ward. Shortly after Donald Trump's presidential campaign team announced that he would be endorsed by a group of 100 black pastors, several pastors vigorously protested that they were not endorsing Trump after all.
Team Trump scaled back their plans over the Thanksgiving weekend. The billionaire Republican candidate would have only a closed-door meeting with dozens of pastors for two hours Monday at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Welcome to another episode of the unfolding reality TV show that Trump calls a presidential campaign. I call this episode "The Donald and the Blacks," in honor of his often-repeated declaration: "I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
And that's not all. "I have a great relationship with the Mexican people," he told NBC News after causing an international uproar over his characterization of illegal immigrants from Mexico as criminals, rapists and drug dealers. "I love them, they love me."
Plus, "I have a great relationship with many Russians," he told Real Estate Weekly in 2013 after his Miss Universe contest took place in Moscow.
In fact, "I get along with everybody," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper this summer. "And you know what? I've been very successful. Everybody loves me."
Not everybody. The Rev. Darrell C. Scott of the Ohio-based New Spiritual Revival Center, who organized the meeting, said on CNN Monday night that some of the pastors who had initially agreed "got scared" after receiving negative backlash from their own parishioners and others.
Part of that was generated by an open letter from more than 100 black ministers, theologians and religious activists posted Friday on Ebony.com. The signatories were "deeply confounded" that their colleagues would meet with a candidate who "routinely uses overtly divisive and racist language on the campaign trail" and whose politics are "so clearly anti-black."
The letter raises issues of intolerance that the clergy in Trump's meeting say they discussed with him. They included a fracas last weekend in which a Black Lives Matter protester was punched and kicked at a Trump campaign rally in Alabama, after which Trump responded, "Maybe he should have been roughed up."
The open letter also mentions how Trump tweeted a chart of bogus black murder statistics that wildly overstated the percentage of white murder victims killed by blacks.
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